Introduction

This book has engaged with the practice and politics of everyday global resistance through a performative study of the emergence of British comedy. Against instrumental and critical approaches to the role of comedy and resistance in global politics, I argue that we need to pay more attention to the productive elements of humour. Too often, the study of comedy is limited by a particular vision of politics, whether state-centric and driven by a normative ontology of satirical engagement, or universalist and based on a quite demanding view of emancipation through subversion. Instead, by tracing a more performative account of comic resistance, the book suggested we should move away from questions of whether this or that joke can make an impact, or spark revolutionary change. Everyday comic resistances perform within a context of global social power relations. While certain jokes, in certain circumstances, may question, subvert, or otherwise undermine the everyday hierarchies of global market life, others may work to affirm such exclusions, or else provide a socially resonant, if potentially violent, mode of inclusion. Simply put, comedy does different things in different circumstances and that is precisely why it is political. By adopting this more open understanding of comedy ‘as’ politics, my framework of analysis has in turn licensed a more proliferative understanding of what comedy and humour can be/ do. As Berlant and Ngai (2017: 235) argue:

British comedy seems a particularly fascinating case of an ‘epistemologically troubling’ discourse because so much of its focus has been upon the limits of Britishness: the ridiculous arrogance, the elitism, the racism and so on. Ironically, this critical reflexivity seems to be the very basis of its commercial success. How such an ambiguous vernacular is recuperated, re-phrased or re-imagined is a complex question of politics and the political that eludes easy resolution.